Let me tell you, True Believers: in the annals of Dominican piety there has never been prayer like this. The rosaries cabling through La Inca's fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman's hands. And before you could say Holy! Holy! Holy! she was joined by a flock of women, young and old [...]." (1.3.17.3)

And now we arrive at the strangest part of our tale. Whether what follows was a figment of Beli's wrecked imagination or something else altogether I cannot say. Even your Watcher has his silences, his páginas en blanco [blank pages]. [...]. So as Beli was flitting in and out of life, there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt. This one was quite large for its species and placed its intelligent little paws on her chest and stared down at her. (1.3.18.15)

There are still many, on and off the Island, who offer Beli's near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the house of Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-líos in one lifetime—what in carajo [the f***] else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli's survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of canefields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a "mother" with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed. (1.3.19.1)